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From social barometers to audience profiling – content marketing trends

Customer personas are SO last year – the next social barometer is audience profiling

Content marketing is the junction at which advertisers, publishers and social media nodes are set to collide. With the rough and ready terrain of today’s digital landscape providing so many channels and methods to explore, these promotional vehicles are going to need a serious re-fit to stay on the road. And, while a customer profile would once have been all an advertiser needed to launch a campaign, When I Work’s VP Sujan Patel believes that building an audience for greater industry authority should be treated as a wholly separate entity. To cement trust and push advertising content to a broader demographic, Patel states that marketers should carry out audience profiling specific to each channel; from blogs to podcasts, Instagram to Twitter.

The marriage of advertising and editorial will breed better content

A saturated market means it’s time to make your content stand out from the crowd. CMI’s latest content marketing survey has made some serious waves, with content rainmakers queuing up to tell copywriters what an 8% fall in perceived effectiveness means for the industry. And, while bemoaning the loss of content’s ‘low hanging fruit’, B2B marketing strategist David Dodd does give a simple interpretation of what these figures might mean for content trends in 2016. With spammy content firmly dead and even quality content now competing for eye-time, audience profiling and engagement will require a whole new level of originality and intrigue to get seen. This is the year that advertising and editorial will truly merge, requiring broader subject matter that reflects the lifestyles of the audience, not just their relationship with your company.

A lack of definition will define content marketing in 2016

Generating a buzz in 2016 won’t only be about finding engaging new topics: there will be a host of other variables for content marketers to juggle in order to get it right. Diginomica’s Barb Mosher Zinck thinks that this year’s definitive trend will be a lack of definition. Content marketers will spend their time experimenting with content asset type, quality, quantity and time to market, as well as viable hardware and software, trying to find the right alchemy to turn content’s pig iron into gold. With so much known about what makes bad content in the eyes of Google and consumers, this is how content marketers will find a recipe that can help to put the right content in front of the right audience at the right time, bucking the effectiveness trend illustrated by CMI’s most recent figures.

Social content engines will become our new best friends

To better navigate the diversification of content, Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin says we’ll need a new compass to guide the way towards better audience profiling. The communal barometer looks likely to be a social content engine, such as Pocket’s Recommendations or a dedicated app like Nuzzel. These aggregate content being viewed by related communities, providing recommendations based on users with a similar profile. Acting as both a social amplifier and influencer, getting content published on such an engine would point the way towards a search ranking boost, as well as helping to inspire new content creation. So sure is Fishkin of this trend, that he predicts at least one of these social content engines will reach the same heights as second-tier social media platforms by the start of 2017.